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Romantic Circles Blog

Romantic Circles, a pioneering website focused on Romantic era literature and culture, is seeking a new Editor of its Reviews section. Now in its 18th year, Romantic Circles receives nearly 400,000 unique visits from users in 190 countries, who view a total of approximately 800,000 pages per year.

The Editor of Reviews will be working with our editorial team to expand the scope of reviews to include not only monographs, but also digital humanities projects and research tools. Under consideration, as well, is a more informal section of reviews that would cover representations of Romanticism in popular media.

Please send nominations, including self-nominations for RC Review Editor, to rc-geneds@umd.edu. Nominations should include the candidate’s contact information.

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RC is pleased to announce the latest update to The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and his Circle. Tim Fulford and his co-editors have added annotated texts of newly-discovered letters by Robert and his brothers George and Nathaniel. Fragments of a MS poem by George are also presented. Altogether, the new texts illuminate the rapidly-changing print culture of the early nineteenth century. They show the relationship between labouring-class writers and their gentlemen patrons to have been more complex than previously thought; they reveal the power of the reviewing journals; they exhibit the political divisions within the rural working class, even in times of scarcity and protest. And they provide fascinating contemporary portraits of figures including Cobbett, Fox, and the Duchess of Devonshire. Among the works discussed are Robert's third collection Wild Flowers and Nathaniel's Essay on War.

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Romantic Circles is delighted to announce the publication in its Praxis Series of Romantic Antiquarianism, edited by Noah Heringman and Crystal B. Lake.

Featuring essays by leading art historians, literary scholars, and historians of antiquarianism, this volume sheds new light on Romanticism's material and visual cultures, and reveals the important role that antiquarian discourses and practices played in shaping neoclassicism, the sublime, and other major concepts of the Romantic period. In this moment, antiquarianism became all the more important, as increasingly specialized study of historical periods and different types of objects shaped the networks that linked antiquaries, engravers, and publishers with a public eager to experience in detail the customs and manners or material culture of the past.

Romantic Antiquarianism includes an editor's introduction by Noah Heringman and Crystal B. Lake, with essays by Martin Myrone, Jonathan Sachs, Thora Brylowe, Rosemary Hill, Timothy Campbell, Ina Ferris, & Sam Smiles, and a response by Jonah Siegel. It can be found here:

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An Academic Seminar organized by the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association and the Keats Foundation, and supported by the British School at Rome

31 October 2014 at the KEATS-SHELLEY HOUSE, Rome

In order to mark the bicentenary of the composition of ‘Imitation of Spenser’ (1814), John Keats’s earliest known poem, the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association and the Keats Foundation are jointly hosting a day academic seminar on 31 October, Keats’s birthday, at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome.

Proposals for papers are invited on any subject focusing on, or relating to, Keats’s early poems, from ‘Imitation of Spenser’ itself up to the publication of his first full-length volume, Poems (1817).

Papers discussing poems by Keats published later than 1817 may, of course, be accepted, but only by means of comparison with earlier poems. Papers may be given in English or in Italian, and abstracts accepted in either language.
Deadline for submission of abstracts (c. 200 words): 30 June 2014. Registration fee €25.

For further information on registration, and to send your abstract, please contact in the first instance:
Dr Giuseppe Albano, Curator, Keats-Shelley House, Romegiuseppe.albano@keats-shelley-house.org

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Jonathan Branney of the Liverpool University Press recently posted an announcement to the NASSR listserv that two its Romanticism-related publications, Essays in Romanticism and the Byron Journal are free to access during the month of April. Below is the complete announcement:

Liverpool University Press is one of the UK’s oldest scholarly publishers and one of its youngest, being both 115 years old and 10 years old in April 2014.
The latter anniversary marks the relaunch and rebirth of the Press, an event that it is celebrating by making all of its journal content, including Essays in Romanticism and The Byron Journal, available for free online during the month of April.
Essays in Romanticism is the official journal of the International Conference on Romanticism and publishes articles on all aspects of Romanticism. It encourages work using emergent or innovative perspectives and approaches, and that which is situated within an interdisciplinary and comparative framework.
With over 40 years’ worth of content available and a wide international readership, the The Byron Journal is the leading forum for authorities on Byron. The journal publishes scholarly articles and notes on all aspects of Byron's writings and life, and on related topics.
Content is available now simply by visiting our http://liverpool.metapress.com site, with no further setup required. Please feel free to share this information with colleagues, your institutional library contact, or any other interested parties.

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Dennis Low has posted a "Book of Condolences" on the recent passing of Marilyn Butler. Low, a former student of Butler's, is inviting folks to post their own remembrances and condolences on the site. He has also collected all the comments folks have made on the NASSR listserv since her passing.

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The Guardian has posted a rememberance of Marilyn Butler, who died recently.

The first paragraph reads,

Marilyn Butler, who has died aged 77, was one of the leading scholars of Romanticism of her generation. She perhaps did more than any other academic of recent decades to return Romantic literature to the boisterous history out of which it grew. Her books and editions established her reputation among fellow scholars, but were also read with pleasure by students. In person as well as in print she was wonderfully accessible.

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Just a brief reminder and encouragement to submit materials to this year's NASSR/Romantic Circles Pedagogy Contest.

The contest was started at last year's NASSR Conference as a way of encouraging and highlighting the many teaching innovations occurring in our field. The finalists' panel at the conference yielded a rich and helpful conversation about Romantic pedagogy.

Teachers of all ranks may submit teaching materials. Exemplary submissions consider how teaching revivifies Romanticism, in any of its myriad forms. Digital innovations are encouraged but certainly not required. For a list of previous winners and their syllabi, see the Pedagogy section of the Romantic Circles website: http://www.rc.umd.edu/pedagogies/contest#previous.

Finalists will be chosen via author-blind peer review to give a short presentation at a special panel at this year's conference in Washington DC, and their syllabi will be published on the Romantic Circles Pedagogies website. The winner, chosen after the panel, will receive a $250 award and recognition at the NASSR banquet. For more information on the contest see the NASSR 2014 website: https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/nassr2014/pedagogy-contest/.

TO SUMBIT:
Please send a document of between 3-5 pages to nassrpedagogycontest@gmail.com by April 2, 2014. Please include a cover letter with identifying information, which should be left off all other documents. Initial queries and questions are welcomed.

Potential materials might include but are not limited to:
- A cover letter and explanation of the submission, including an argument as to the course or project’s pedagogical innovation and benefits
- Syllabus or parts of a syllabus
- Assignment sheets
- Multimedia or digital materials

In the interview, Mellor recounts her determined commitment to rethinking Romanticism through the lens of gender. On the eve of retirement, she continues to raise questions about our assumptions and preoccupations as Romanticists, even as she looks back on her long career. The audio clips attached to the transcription resonate with Mellor’s intellectual curiosity, her voice prompting a return to the texts, archives, and critical concerns of feminist Romanticism. Roxanne Eberle introduces the volume and conducts the interview.

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BBC news has reported the discovery of a cache of previously unknown letters by Mary Shelley. The find came while Professor Nora Crook of Anglia Ruskin University was researching the holdings of a public records office in Essex, UK. The discovery of the letters, addressed to Horace Smith and his daughter Eliza, was quite by accident, according to Crook. A brief extract from the BBC article explains Crook's account of the find:

"I had an idea that an anonymous review of a book by Miss Crumpe might be by Mary Shelley."

That idea turned out to be wrong but the search took her to the Essex Record Office's online archive.

It was while looking at documents there that she came across a letter from Shelley joking her father was "half in love" with Miss Crump.

"I knew immediately that the phrase had to come from an unpublished letter—and there turned out to be more," she added.